Why would a (initially!) social media consulting company whose main activities are advising clients about social media strategy, risk management and analytics go out and build a startup to send images to Instagram?

Quite simply, because we got sick of being asked "why can't you upload and schedule images to Instagram" by our clients and people in the social media community management industry.

We're not a specialist web development shop, and as a result Sked was cobbled together in a brief series of months in late 2013 and launched in January 2014, and experienced some great growth since. We've learned a lot from creating our first "internal startup", and particularly one as finnicky as Sked due to the way we have to architect the system to maintain compliance with Instagram's terms.

You've probably received a multitude of messages from Director Hugh Stephens who is the main driving force behind Sked Social, but it's likely more of our team will jump in and help as Sked grows over time.

The important thing for us throughout though was to ensure that our customers for Sked are treated just like our customers as consultants (ranging from small business through to governments and multinationals) -- that every communication matters, every problem hurts and that the best way to provide great customer service is to be attentive to your users' needs. That's why we often encourage users to message us about their ideas for improving the service: some of our best features came from brief messages users sent us with "it would be great if Sked could...".

Just because a customer of Sked doesn't pay us project fees our hourly rates, we believe you should always receive the same quality service level that we treat all of our customers, whether it's those working with us on large-scale projects or someone attending one of our online training courses.

Ultimately the reason we do what we do (both Sked and at Dialogue Group broadly) is to encourage businesses and organisations to improve the way they engage with potential and actual customers (or stakeholders in government ;) ).